The Indefiniteness Unbeknownst To Us
by Clare DeTamble
Summary: Come with me." The effects, four years down the road. AU, Literati. 2 of 10 posted.
1. Default Chapter

The Indefiniteness Unbeknownst To Us

Chapter One, "Cuts Are Leaving Creases"

**Disclaimer: **I am in no affiliation with the WB, _Gilmore Girls_, its writers, creators, et cetera, nor am I in any affiliation with Dashboard Confessional, or the song "If you can't leave it be, might as well make it bleed", from which the chapter titles derive.

A twenty one year old man sits at a table in a run down area of New York City. The table is dusty, chipped at all ends, barely standing. He is furiously scribbling numbers on a piece of paper, trying to ignore the block letters on a bill stating "STUDENT LOANS".

He doesn't notice his wife, who is standing behind him. The ends of her long, straggly hair drip with wetness. She taps him on the shoulder.

"Do we have a clean towel anywhere?" They hardly bother to address each other using names anymore.

He looks at her fiercely, and says with much indignation, "What do you think?"

This tone does not bother her. They are immune to each other's harshness and frustration, or so they like to think.

"Well, excuse me for asking one damn question." She turns around, and heads over to their makeshift bedroom. She rummages through a pile of shirts, and pulls out the first one that looks clean.

She looks at _him_, almost willing him to leave. He knows she isn't embarrassed of changing in front of him; they are married after all, strictly by law at the moment, but still married. The dark haired man blinks, and looks at, not into, her eyes again.

She drops it, or, as she'd reason, it slips out of her hands. She bends and her hand hovers over it, and she hesitates to pick it up. She doesn't, but instead navigates her way to the bathroom.

He looks at her one more time, then picks up the shirt and places it on their couch. He lets his eyes wander out the window. He sees the sun, trying to push through the clouds and the rain, and he suddenly feels as if he is in a novel. What kind of world is it when the weather mirrors you? It scares him for a moment, but he is taken out of thought when he hears the bathroom door slam closed.

One of Rory's hands is still placed on the cold metal handle, the other on the equally cold sink. Ironically, she feels warmer behind the chipping wooden door. She always has taken comfort in not dealing with her problems. She becomes fixated on a little spot on the sink before taking the still damp towel from the night before and shivering beneath it as she wraps it around her head. She then forces her hands underneath cold running water. Soon she feels pain and then her hands are numb. She's beginning to understand the action of physical hurt to take away from the emotional kind. She stays in the bathroom for a minute or two more, letting her hand caress the wooden door. The part of her she does not know, the one she has just been introduced to through the water incident, hopes she gets a splinter. That side of her scares her. She's partially in a trance because of this now, and when she exits, she bumps into Jess.

"Watch where you're going." She mumbles to him. A few minutes later, as he emerges out of the bedroom and she makes her way down the hall, they collide again.

"Ow!" she yells. It is over dramatic and unnecessary, but it is not as loud as she intended it to be. She wants her scream to cause tremors around the earth. She wants to shock people. She wants so much, but all she has is pent up frustration.

"That's my calculator," she comments, when she sees what is in his hands. "That cost a lot of money."

"I need to use it."

"It cost a lot of money," she repeats, but she doesn't know why.

"I need to use it."

"Don't do anything to it."

"I'm not five." He says the sentence slowly and fiercely. They sit in silence at the same table. She is trying to fit as much as she can in her forty-five second piece on the community news channel. Minutes, maybe hours pass, and he rises and opens the window.

Seconds later, she shuts it.

And he opens it again.

"I'm cold."

"I need air."

"Go outside."

"Put a sweater on." Their bicker goes on. She wants the window closed and he wants the window open. It is like them, though, to use those same methods while approaching a situation. They have both noticed it.

With the window half open, Rory has spitefully put on three sweaters and Jess has equally spitefully brought out the fan from the closet and set it behind him. She drops her pencil and looks at him. The more he gets frustrated the harder he pushes the buttons on the calculator.

"What the hell are you doing? You're going to break it."

"That's all you keep telling me. I'm going to break it. Actually that's all I've heard in my life. 'You're going to break it; you're going to break it'. Well, guess what, it's broken." He says.

"The calculator?" She does not catch on until he denies it. Then she realizes. There is an awkward beat.

"What are you doing?" she tries to ask calmly, with little hostility in her voice.

"Writing a letter to Santa Claus." She no longer finds his sarcastic remarks funny or endearing. She wishes he'd grow up.

"Santa Claus isn't real." Is the only reply she can think of.

"No shit, Sherlock."

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to find us a way out of debt. Colombia isn't exactly community college, and sure the hell isn't in that price range." She wonders if he blames their financial standings on her.

"I'm going to bed." She mutters, leaving her pencil and paper at the table. When he hears the door click, he takes the pencil and slams it down into the table, hoping he can get satisfaction out of the crack he knows will sound.

He doesn't.

It is 3 a.m. when he joins her in bed. If it wasn't so cold he would sleep on the couch. He hates when she is right. He wonders why she is sleeping with the light on. He lies down on his back, and leans over to his nightstand. Not even as his body curves to reach the drawer does the gap between them close. He takes out a few aspirin and swallows them without water. He doesn't notice the paper that falls to the ground, and brings darkness to the two separate worlds residing in that room. Before he is succumbed to sleep he thinks the darkness is comforting. He doesn't have to look at her and feel anything. He can hide behind nothing, he can be himself but be nothing, and it's so much easier to pretend that there is truly nothing. And so he lets himself float away, in a small bubble of nothingness.


	2. Trace the scars to fit the pieces

**To Ali, Ari, Becka, Caitlin, Dani, Elise, Elizabeth, Katie, ****Leigh, ****Lydia****, Mai, Marissa, Meghan, Stephanie, and Tina.**** To all the girls at b-m-g; the ones I had the privilege of meeting, and the ones I didn't. To the way it used to be.**

It is quite a life to wake up, each morning, with a weight, pulling and pulling, in the stomach.

Perhaps it's a weight of regret, for not withering away with lack of oxygen during birth, or one of dread of the day that has just begun.

This is how they both greet the new day, though, with a sickened feeling, and a groan.

She wakes first, the off-white sheets tangled around her, and automatically pushes them off of her and swings her feet to the ground. She doesn't bother to look to her side, and isn't careful of the mattress, as she pulls herself from it, like a hand from a left-on burner of a stove.

Minutes later, he peels his arm from his face, glances at the space where she's not, and slides out from the bed.

_They are at the pulling the sheets, and tucking them in at the corners. They move around the bed, smoothing, talking, folding. _

_He is embarrassed of the quality of the mattress they have bought. _

_"Its perfect," she assures him._

_He lies back on the bed, and then frowns up at her. _

_"I can _feel_ the _springs_."_

_"It will be fine," she says, drawing out the last word. "It's a mattress. What's the worst that could happen?"_

_He tries to succumb to her reassurance; lets the embarrassment run from him, and jokes, instead. _

_"Sleep deprivation. Which could worsen our performances in school and/or work, causing you to remain uneducated, and without a job that only accepts people with degrees, and me to lose job, after job, after job. You'd wind up working as a waitress, and I'd be the guy sweeping the cigarettes from the sidewalk outside of a bar. We'd be dirt-poor and living in a bullet-proof box on a street corner somewhere."_

_"That doesn't sound too bad," she looks, amused, at him._

_"Then Giuliani would be elected as mayor again, and us and our little bullet-proof box would be shipped off to wherever he put the rest of the homeless people." _

_She raises her eyebrows._

_"_And_ we'd have back problems." _

_Shaking her head, she sings, "I think you need sleep." _

_"Sleep deprivation," he reminds her._

_"You're mentally predisposing yourself to this destruction-of-life-by-mattress. Let's at least try it out." _

_His eyes focus in on hers. _

_"Try it out?"_

_"Yeah."__ Her eyes flicker from his to her palms to his eyes again, and she offers him a girlish, but coy look. He takes her hands and pulls her to lie on top of him. _

_They make love, of course. But not like eighteen-year-olds, in delight of having an empty apartment to themselves. Not like adults, pleased with their own performances in the bedroom. Not like a newly married couple, enthralled by the idea of just being married._

_They don't even make love like themselves._

_Neither is sure of what they're doing, of who they are. But they are sure of each other. _

_She is confident in him, and he, in her. (The latter is quite literal.) _

_And they know that they want to call themselves a "we," so they cling to each other, as if making a point to the bare walls and un-finished floors that they are, in fact, a "we."_

_The bed makes a point of this to them._

_They lie under the new sheets in the embrace of one another. Then, it hits them._

_This is real. This is _their _bed. They are here, together, not a _he _or a _she _but a them_.

_As simple as it is, this is a tough realization for them to process._

_They have _made love in _their_ bed.

_They seem to think this at the same time; their eyes find each other, and not long after, their bodies do the same. _

He showers (she showers before bed), and they dress in separate rooms. Neither eat breakfast; Rory drinks a glass of cold water, but, other than that, they do not eat. It hardly matters – they aren't hungry.

There's an awkward moment when they crowd at the same side of the kitchen to retrieve their keys from the dish on the counter.

If they leave at the same time, they walk down the same streets to the same train station. When they were young, it was sweet. They had their routine clichéd down into an art. They woke together, ate together, sometimes showered together; she told him to tuck in his shirttails, he commented, with a cocky smirk, on the way her skirt hung. They held hands, him, a perfect gentleman, on the side of the sidewalk closest to the street, and kissed goodbye on the platform when his train sped out from the dark, curved tunnel. (Her first class didn't begin until twenty five minutes after he needed to be at work.)

That was when everything was new to them. Like teens at a party, they were, trying to do everything and live every way they had read of, seen in movies, known of adults doing. They couldn't be blamed. They were excited, and in love; it just all wore out too quickly.

_Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe. _

It is too odd a concept for them to walk together now. It's quite a paradox, really, to walk together separately. They can sleep in the same bed alone, they can eat at the same table alone, they can fight separately together, they can cry for the same reasons alone, but for some reason, they have not figured out how to walk alone.

Sometimes he will walk quickly, and she will consciously slow, and he will be on the far right of her, between a curb and a person walking a dog. Or sometimes she'll stop into the corner store and pick up the _New York Times _and the _Daily News _(god forbid she even look at _The Post_), and the days when she doesn't stop in (she gets the papers from a vendor in the train station, then) he goes in to buy himself a coffee.

Yet, somehow, they always wind up getting stopped at the same light, or walking on the same side of the street, or behind the other as they clutter down the steps when they reach their destination.

Today is no exception, as they do leave at the same time. They avoid each other mostly, until she stops at the green-gated stairwell, and smells the aroma of his coffee behind him.

Coffee disgusts her now. Too many nostalgic thoughts are tied to it in the long-term memory part of her mind. Stops at Luke's, Lorelai...it's all too much for her to handle. She doesn't drink it anymore; she hasn't even opened the coffee maker Jess bought her with his first three paychecks. She hates the smell of coffee.

Even more, she hates the smell of the city.

The smell of spring in Central Park, the scent of burnt hot dogs and cold pretzels at each corner, the fumes of the buses, the musk of Chinatown, the colognes of the rich on Park Avenue, the cigarettes in the Village, the aroma of the Hispanic foods in upper Harlem.

She hates them all.

She decides, though, as her heels scratch at the concrete steps leading to the train station, that her least favorite smell of all is the odor of the musicians and the artists who sway on the platforms, eyes pleading for attention.

They stink as if they haven't seen soap in days.

This is not what bothers her.

When she passes them, she can smell the tears on their faces, the stale food in their sighs.

They reek of dead dreams.

She does not know that he can smell them, too. Unlike her, it is not them he despises.

He despises the people who, in a selfish desperation, murdered those dreams for them.

He despises them with every being of his soul, and he remembers this, each time he hears the violinists' weakened notes.

**The quote "Quick-loving..." used in this chapter is from Elizabeth Barret Browning's _Sonnet XXXII_, published in Sonnets of the Portuguese. **


End file.
